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Texas banned phones in schools as well. A local school administrator told me “in the high school, the lunch room is now loud with talking and laughter!” There

Texas banned phones in schools as well. A local school administrator told me “in the high school, the lunch room is now loud with talking and laughter!” There are still parents that complain. Turns out they are as addicted to texting with their kids all day as their kids are addicted to the same. Regardless, it’s great to see that the ban has seemingly nudged things in a healthier direction. Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change.

softwaredoug 1y ago
Phones might be as much a symptom as a cause The related issue is parents are overly protective of teens and don't give them enough independence. You see this in a lot of different ways from parents wanting to text their kids, to only letting kids do highly managed structured activities, to treating teens as their best friends, to helicopter parenting protecting kids from all adversity, etc etc And a similar thing happens not just with parents, but society, there are not a lot of places teens can just hang out. A lot of fun things teens would do increasingly ban minors. If you want teens off devices, you need to give them alternatives
- soupfordummies 1y ago
  There's also the symptom that almost our entire society is addicted to staring at their phones for at least 4 hours a day. Go literally ANYWHERE and just look at the people around you if you don't think so.
  - softwaredoug 1y ago
    The counter to phone is dog. My dog stares up at someone until they acknowledge him. Then I end up talking to the person. And everyone has a nice interaction. Usually they get a nice serotonin bump.
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    Yeah. As someone who spends way too much time on their phone... I'm pretty sure that I have access to all kinds of alternatives, and that I have the agency necessary to getting off my phone. I'm pretty sure there's an awful lot more to it.
    - teekert 1y ago
      For sure, and you at least acknowledge it. As do I, I'm ashamed of my screen time reports. I feel weak.
      - rkomorn 1y ago
        At some point I started spending more time on my computer to reduce my phone screen time. And the worst part is that that made sense to me for a few days. Big screen = professional tech person. Small screen = phone addicted loser. HN tabs open on both.
        teekert 1y ago
        I think it is the same as with food, we just have to not get tempted. It probably would take something as radical as getting a dumbphone, DNS blocking additive sites, ditching the toilet-scroller. I'm on a website before I realize it.
        em500 1y ago
        The addictive substance is the network,not the phone. Nobody gets addicted to any phone disconnected from the internet. OTOH, as you experienced it's easy to spend just as much time on the laptop or desktop when that has a persistent internet connection.
        lrvick 1y ago
        First thing I did to beat my addiction was keep my phone in airplane mode at all times, and just rely on wifi. After porting my number to a voip provider, i just canceled my cell phone subscription and then the device was no longer a phone, but a wifi tablet. a boring tool i could easily leave at home most of the time until I never took it with me again.
  - bsghirt 1y ago
    Why is the exact device the problem? 20 years ago everyone on suburban trains would be looking at a newspaper, magazine or book throughout their journey. Then they would watch a couple of hours of TV at home. Why is 'looking at a phone' such a problem, when most of the looking replicates those activities, with much of the rest being basic utilities which didn't exist previously - consulting a map, ordering food or shopping, looking up timetables or schedules?
    - sersi 1y ago
      I remember meeting a lot of people by just talking to them in the subway during y daily commute. That happened both in France and Japan. Nowadays with phones it happens a lot less..
      - fn-mote 1y ago
        > talking to them [...] Japan Really struggling to imagine people talking on the subway during their morning commute in Japan!! Culture changes.
      - bsghirt 1y ago
        I commuted by public transit for around two decades before the ubiquity of smartphones and never experienced or witnessed this.
      - throwaway2037 1y ago
        You spoke with "a lot" of people in Japan on the subway during your daily commute? I am stunned here. Can you provide more details? (Years / location / line?) I find this very hard to believe. Metro trains in Tokyo and Osaka (and suburbs) are basically silent except very late when people are drunk, talking with their friends.
        sersi 1y ago
        Kyoto 2005 to 2008. Mostly Kintetsu and subway (mostly between Kyoto and Nara). Later keihan from demachiyanagi to shijo kawaramachi. I am the one who often initiated the conversation (apart from some osaka bachans who did initiate. I'm using that term of endearment not criticism despite their fearful reputation Osaka bachans are great). There were also significantly less tourists back then. Made a few friends with whom I still stay in touch. Also met my first wife like this. I had the same experience of meeting people in the same way in Shanghai in 2004 (bus and subway). And before that, in France，the bus line I took near my university was filled with students.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    Yesterday I had a meeting with a friend and wound up having to wait 20 minutes for him. Instead of being bored out of my mind, I doom scrolled.
    - tigerlily 1y ago
      That's abominable, sir. We need you to take care of your brain :)
    - Dilettante_ 1y ago
      That's the problem actually. Not a second of "boredom", where there isn't something happening. Downtime is important, and I don't mean popping on the TV and vegetating until it's time to go to bed.
    - lrvick 1y ago
      bring a mechanical puzzle, or a book to read, or a lock to pick, or a tiny pocketable laptop that allows you to actually be productive, and leave the brainrot device at home, or get rid of it. 5 years free of doom scrolling and never been happier or more productive in my life.
- cjbgkagh 1y ago
  It’s a tight feedback loop, use of phones is a symptom caused by problems caused by use of phones. To break it you have to stop using the phone. This is far simpler and more broadly applicable than figuring out who has dopamine disregulation and putting them on meds. My ADHD is clearly genetic and I’m heavily medicated for it and even still I have difficulty with phone addiction and self control. I would appreciate an environment that aided in this by making tempting things harder to access. For a long time we were told it was self control causing the issues of weight gain and not changes to the food, diets, and eating patterns. We were told that such problems couldn’t be solved with a magic pill, well for me that magic pill was ozempic and it really did solve 95% of my problems. I had uncontrolled weight gain after taking the Covid vaccine and now 4 years later, two on a rather low dose of ozempic and I’m finally back to normal. I was as disciplined before taking ozempic as I was after so it’s clear that the ozempic had a drastically positive effect. I think an aversion to empathy leads us to blame people as the cause of their own predicaments, but this blinds us to other causes and fixes. Sometimes it really is the environment.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > but society, there are not a lot of places teens can just hang out. A lot of fun things teens would do increasingly ban minors. What fun things ban minors? I’m genuinely asking, because I don’t see that around here.
  - lizknope 1y ago
    When I was a kid in the 1980's and early 90's the mall was the place to go and hang out. Go to the food court, arcade, shoe stores, Spencer's gifts. Google "malls that ban teenagers" and you will find a lot of articles. I have been to a few places that have signs "Anyone under 18 must be chaperoned by an adult."
    - kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
      Usually that's the result of an incident with premeditated mayhem from an unsupervised gathering.
      - Dylan16807 1y ago
        Maybe there's some rare incident, maybe they're just annoyed the teens don't spend enough per hour. It doesn't really matter. Teens aren't some special danger, and it's bad when places want to give off the impression of being a nice public place but fail to be one in significant ways.
        lotsofpulp 1y ago
        It doesn’t matter to a non stakeholder like you. For the business owners, it clearly matters.
        Dylan16807 1y ago
        What they think has very little relevance to the problem of teens having nowhere to go. And in general the US has been really lacking in third places.
- jimt1234 1y ago
  Many parents I talk to have this notion that idle-time/free-time for their children is unproductive, a waste of time, and thus bad for their children. And that's why they feel the need to micromanage their kids' time - "If I don't give Timmy productive things to do, he'll just rot away." There's a number of articles about this topic, but I just don't see parents accepting the message: boredom is good for young people. Heck, boredom is why I got into programming my Commodore-64 back in the day - Midwest winters are long and boring as shit, lots of time stuck inside. - https://youthfirstinc.org/why-its-important-for-your-child-to-be-bored/ https://youthfirstinc.org/why-its-important-for-your-child-t... - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/well/family/kids-summer-boredom.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/well/family/kids-summer-b...
  - pavel_lishin 1y ago
    We took away my kid's screens for a week because we caught her lying to us about something. She was understandably upset and bored for a few days, and then found ways to occupy her time. Not productive ways - but ways that reminded me of what I did as a kid without screens.
  - bitwize 1y ago
    Maybe that's why so many of the best demoscene coders are from northern Europe—Germany, Scandinavia, Finland? Bored kids with nothing to do but faff with their computers?
    - kqr 1y ago
      ...who spends half the year in darkness, to boot. It's so bad they even have a national holiday to grieve the departure of the sun and call for its return!
- airtonix 1y ago
  [dead]
- lrvick 1y ago
  In my household no one has cell phones, so we set expectations of checking in once a day via chat over wifi from laptops, radio, meshtastic, or picking up a public phone... and otherwise learn to be resourceful, self confident, and independent. I am convinced these skills will benefit a kid more than being good at doom scrolling.
  - throwaway2037 1y ago
    > In my household no one has cell phones Do you live in the Bora Bora caves!? Seriously, in many highly developed countries, you need a mobile phone for essential government services.
    - lrvick 1y ago
      Hardly. I run a b2b tech company in silicon valley, frequently travel the world, and have a fairly active social life. No essential services ever -require- a phone. Just say it is against your unspecified religion and watch them fall over backwards to create alternatives for you. It is always hilarious to watch someone at a theme park or restaurant produce a paper map or menu just after saying they no longer exist moments earlier. If I travel overnight my only tech is a tiny laptop to work on the go, but when it is closed it is off, and not able to notify me.
  - nilus0sora 1y ago
    I was intrigued enough by this comment to create an account. I noticed you mentioned ‘radio’. Do you mean HAM? Like you key up on local 2m repeaters with your HTs? (Our twins got their tech licenses in middle school and we had appointed check-in times during the day). I applaud you for being in the heart of the tech Beast but not subject to it.
    - navbaker 1y ago
      We have some friends (husband and wife) that we met because our kids play together and they are the first people I’ve met that are licensed ham operators! They each have their operator number on their license plates for their respective cars since our state has radio operator plates you can upgrade to!
duxup 1y ago
One of the nicest things about the ban (not total ban) at my kids school is no more parent email "Talk to your kids about their phone" type emails. The kids who are really abusing their phone have parents who don't care to deal with it and they're not reading the emails. The emails just hassle the parents of the kids who already don't do the bad thing. Now if they see a phone it's taken and if taken enough times (twice) the parents have to go to the office to retrieve the phone and have a meeting. Pressure is now on the parents and kids who are the problem.
- darknavi 1y ago
  It's pretty funny how full circle this is. This was exactly how it was when I was in middle school in flip-phone days (and it happened to me once!).
onionisafruit 1y ago
Funny to see a school administrator talking positively about a loud lunch room. We used to constantly get reprimanded for being too loud.
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
  We did too, but not as a rule and not always, just as a preference of whatever petty tyrant was standing in the lunch room that day
- foobarian 1y ago
  First you teach them to talk and walk, and then you tell them to shut up and sit down. - old 90s joke
RyanOD 1y ago
Yes, parents are definitely part of the problem here. I am a former teacher and my wife is an active teacher so we've seen this first hand. Though not entirely to blame, parenting is certainly a part of the cell phone addiction problem. Setting time limits and holding kids accountable for breaking rules around phone use would go a long way toward guiding kids toward more healthy behaviors and letting them know someone cares about their well-being. Modeling constrained phone use is another aspect. Parents will struggle to get their kids off their phones if they are spending all their own free time scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.
- lrvick 1y ago
  100% which is why I refused to even try to be a parent until I gave up my smartphone. Parents unable to be present with their kids, should not be parents.
  - 0_____0 1y ago
    I'm expecting a newborn soon and thinking the same. What did you change?
    - hvs 1y ago
      Get in the habit of putting your phone down when you are in the room with your child. Don't have it on the dinner table, or anywhere you would socialize with your children. It's really best to just avoid using it as much as possible around your kids. Obviously, if you have to make appointments and stuff, that's different, but scrolling social media, reading news, etc. should be left for the evenings after kids are in bed. Kids don't really care what you say as much as they are always watching what you do.
      - ryandrake 1y ago
        The overall lesson for your kids should be that a phone is a tool you use to accomplish some task that takes a limited time. You turn on the phone, do the task (whether it be making a phone call, looking up an address, whatever) and then you turn it off. A phone is not a consumption/entertainment device that you sit down and just use, without a clear end state. You, as the parent, need to internalize this, and live that attitude yourself, and chances are the kid will follow your good example. Problem is, many parents are also addicted to their phones, and won't be able to have the discipline to use them this way.
mynameisash 1y ago
> Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change. I assume you mean that it's a failure of the school's leadership? My kids' school has been applying more strict bans on phones. I wish they would just flat-out ban them -- no more phones in school, period. But even with their moderate ban, there are a lot of parents that push back because "what if there's an emergency and I need to contact my child?" That makes me think that it's probably just easier (to say nothing of broader-impact) for schools to appeal to state lawmakers: just do a statewide ban, then the school doesn't have to fight parents.
- estearum 1y ago
  I don't think you can expect schools to stand up to hordes of smartphone-addicted parents demanding no action on this. State-level regulation provides IMO very necessary cover.
Rebelgecko 1y ago
Don't have the link handy, but there was a blog post I saw on HN by a teacher who asked students to spend an hour on their phones in class and record the source of notifications. IIRC texts from parents was one of the top sources of disruption.
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  I am so curious. I don't want to start a gender war, but is it text messages from mom or dad? I cannot believe the majority come from dad.
elzbardico 1y ago
Jesus! those folks need to leave their kids alone! they are at school!
- rufus_foreman 1y ago
  Hey! Parent! Leave them kids alone. All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
SchemaLoad 1y ago
Australia has done this for public schools recently. It's been a huge success. Private schools have banned phones for ages. As a teenager I hated how the rule applied during lunch as well, but now I realise it was primarily to get us to physically talk to each other and interact rather than scrolling reddit in the corner. So I'm very thankful we had that rule.
amelius 1y ago
Solution: put a bunch of terminals in the school allowing the kids to send emails to their parents.
easterncalculus 1y ago
> There are still parents that complain. Turns out they are as addicted to texting with their kids all day as their kids are addicted to the same. It turns out this is basically 100% of parents in that cohort. Similar with TikTok, finding a parent who says "(endless hours of) TikTok screentime is fine for my kids" without having the same or more screentime themselves is almost impossible.
sjw987 1y ago
I work with a few parents who spend the day texting/messaging their children. Their children in school are being distracted and their learning is being hindered. The parent at work is being distracted and their productivity and focus is being hindered. It's a lose-lose situation all-round. When I was a kid I managed to get through the school day without looking at my phone (went through during the transition to smartphones, first iPhone). I can't comprehend where we go from here if people use their phones this much. One of my colleagues probably sacks off 2 hours or so of their working day constantly checking their phone, and it's vibration patterns on the desk distract me working adjacent to them.
- petesergeant 1y ago
  > I work with a few parents who spend the day texting/messaging their children. What do they talk about?! I would speak to my parents -- in a different country -- once a week by phone, at most, as a kid during term time.
matwood 1y ago
> Turns out they are as addicted to texting with their kids all day as their kids are addicted to the same. This is wild to me. When I was growing up, my mom would make sure I didn't sleep through my alarm as she was walking out the door for work. My dad worked shift work in a factory so I would only randomly see him. Usually after the brief morning 'get up!' I wouldn't see either of my parents again until the street lights came on at night and I rushed home to eat. Once I could drive, I had a job after school until ~10PM, so I would go days without seeing my parents. I grew up in the 80s/90s.
- adrianN 1y ago
  That sounds a bit sad to me. Did you miss your parents? Were your friends in a similar situation?
  - schwartzworld 1y ago
    They called us latchkey kids and it was amazing.
  - matwood 1y ago
    My friends were all pretty much in the same situation. I didn't really think in terms of missing my parents - my friends and I were too busy having fun or as we got older too busy making money. It forced me to become independent very early on which I think has been useful throughout life.
  - conductr 1y ago
    This sounds similar to my experience. I didn’t miss my parents at all, I was comfortably independent at a younger age. Even on weekends when parents were home, I’d rather be out playing with my friends. I remember leaving notes on the table saying “need $ for X” and I’d find cash there the next day. I needed them but we weren’t each others friends and didn’t need to spend an excessive amount of time together.
conductr 1y ago
> Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change. I finished my schooling right as phones were being introduced in the 90s, also in Texas fwiw, but they were so zero-tolerance about any student owned technology all during the 90s (confiscated pagers and cell phones, nobody had laptops yet). Anyways, I never understood how they did a complete 180 only a few years later and students were then allowed to have phones and laptops with them at all times. It seems like they knew this was a bad idea to begin with but somehow lost their will to fight the surge of tech.

softwaredoug 1y ago

Phones might be as much a symptom as a cause The related issue is parents are overly protective of teens and don't give them enough independence. You see this in a lot of different ways from parents wanting to text their kids, to only letting kids do highly managed structured activities, to treating teens as their best friends, to helicopter parenting protecting kids from all adversity, etc etc And a similar thing happens not just with parents, but society, there are not a lot of places teens can just hang out. A lot of fun things teens would do increasingly ban minors. If you want teens off devices, you need to give them alternatives

soupfordummies 1y ago
There's also the symptom that almost our entire society is addicted to staring at their phones for at least 4 hours a day. Go literally ANYWHERE and just look at the people around you if you don't think so.
- softwaredoug 1y ago
  The counter to phone is dog. My dog stares up at someone until they acknowledge him. Then I end up talking to the person. And everyone has a nice interaction. Usually they get a nice serotonin bump.
- rkomorn 1y ago
  Yeah. As someone who spends way too much time on their phone... I'm pretty sure that I have access to all kinds of alternatives, and that I have the agency necessary to getting off my phone. I'm pretty sure there's an awful lot more to it.
  - teekert 1y ago
    For sure, and you at least acknowledge it. As do I, I'm ashamed of my screen time reports. I feel weak.
    - rkomorn 1y ago
      At some point I started spending more time on my computer to reduce my phone screen time. And the worst part is that that made sense to me for a few days. Big screen = professional tech person. Small screen = phone addicted loser. HN tabs open on both.
      - teekert 1y ago
        I think it is the same as with food, we just have to not get tempted. It probably would take something as radical as getting a dumbphone, DNS blocking additive sites, ditching the toilet-scroller. I'm on a website before I realize it.
      - em500 1y ago
        The addictive substance is the network,not the phone. Nobody gets addicted to any phone disconnected from the internet. OTOH, as you experienced it's easy to spend just as much time on the laptop or desktop when that has a persistent internet connection.
        lrvick 1y ago
        First thing I did to beat my addiction was keep my phone in airplane mode at all times, and just rely on wifi. After porting my number to a voip provider, i just canceled my cell phone subscription and then the device was no longer a phone, but a wifi tablet. a boring tool i could easily leave at home most of the time until I never took it with me again.
- bsghirt 1y ago
  Why is the exact device the problem? 20 years ago everyone on suburban trains would be looking at a newspaper, magazine or book throughout their journey. Then they would watch a couple of hours of TV at home. Why is 'looking at a phone' such a problem, when most of the looking replicates those activities, with much of the rest being basic utilities which didn't exist previously - consulting a map, ordering food or shopping, looking up timetables or schedules?
  - sersi 1y ago
    I remember meeting a lot of people by just talking to them in the subway during y daily commute. That happened both in France and Japan. Nowadays with phones it happens a lot less..
    - fn-mote 1y ago
      > talking to them [...] Japan Really struggling to imagine people talking on the subway during their morning commute in Japan!! Culture changes.
    - bsghirt 1y ago
      I commuted by public transit for around two decades before the ubiquity of smartphones and never experienced or witnessed this.
    - throwaway2037 1y ago
      You spoke with "a lot" of people in Japan on the subway during your daily commute? I am stunned here. Can you provide more details? (Years / location / line?) I find this very hard to believe. Metro trains in Tokyo and Osaka (and suburbs) are basically silent except very late when people are drunk, talking with their friends.
      - sersi 1y ago
        Kyoto 2005 to 2008. Mostly Kintetsu and subway (mostly between Kyoto and Nara). Later keihan from demachiyanagi to shijo kawaramachi. I am the one who often initiated the conversation (apart from some osaka bachans who did initiate. I'm using that term of endearment not criticism despite their fearful reputation Osaka bachans are great). There were also significantly less tourists back then. Made a few friends with whom I still stay in touch. Also met my first wife like this. I had the same experience of meeting people in the same way in Shanghai in 2004 (bus and subway). And before that, in France，the bus line I took near my university was filled with students.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  Yesterday I had a meeting with a friend and wound up having to wait 20 minutes for him. Instead of being bored out of my mind, I doom scrolled.
  - tigerlily 1y ago
    That's abominable, sir. We need you to take care of your brain :)
  - Dilettante_ 1y ago
    That's the problem actually. Not a second of "boredom", where there isn't something happening. Downtime is important, and I don't mean popping on the TV and vegetating until it's time to go to bed.
  - lrvick 1y ago
    bring a mechanical puzzle, or a book to read, or a lock to pick, or a tiny pocketable laptop that allows you to actually be productive, and leave the brainrot device at home, or get rid of it. 5 years free of doom scrolling and never been happier or more productive in my life.
cjbgkagh 1y ago
It’s a tight feedback loop, use of phones is a symptom caused by problems caused by use of phones. To break it you have to stop using the phone. This is far simpler and more broadly applicable than figuring out who has dopamine disregulation and putting them on meds. My ADHD is clearly genetic and I’m heavily medicated for it and even still I have difficulty with phone addiction and self control. I would appreciate an environment that aided in this by making tempting things harder to access. For a long time we were told it was self control causing the issues of weight gain and not changes to the food, diets, and eating patterns. We were told that such problems couldn’t be solved with a magic pill, well for me that magic pill was ozempic and it really did solve 95% of my problems. I had uncontrolled weight gain after taking the Covid vaccine and now 4 years later, two on a rather low dose of ozempic and I’m finally back to normal. I was as disciplined before taking ozempic as I was after so it’s clear that the ozempic had a drastically positive effect. I think an aversion to empathy leads us to blame people as the cause of their own predicaments, but this blinds us to other causes and fixes. Sometimes it really is the environment.
Aurornis 1y ago
> but society, there are not a lot of places teens can just hang out. A lot of fun things teens would do increasingly ban minors. What fun things ban minors? I’m genuinely asking, because I don’t see that around here.
- lizknope 1y ago
  When I was a kid in the 1980's and early 90's the mall was the place to go and hang out. Go to the food court, arcade, shoe stores, Spencer's gifts. Google "malls that ban teenagers" and you will find a lot of articles. I have been to a few places that have signs "Anyone under 18 must be chaperoned by an adult."
  - kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
    Usually that's the result of an incident with premeditated mayhem from an unsupervised gathering.
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      Maybe there's some rare incident, maybe they're just annoyed the teens don't spend enough per hour. It doesn't really matter. Teens aren't some special danger, and it's bad when places want to give off the impression of being a nice public place but fail to be one in significant ways.
      - lotsofpulp 1y ago
        It doesn’t matter to a non stakeholder like you. For the business owners, it clearly matters.
        Dylan16807 1y ago
        What they think has very little relevance to the problem of teens having nowhere to go. And in general the US has been really lacking in third places.
jimt1234 1y ago
Many parents I talk to have this notion that idle-time/free-time for their children is unproductive, a waste of time, and thus bad for their children. And that's why they feel the need to micromanage their kids' time - "If I don't give Timmy productive things to do, he'll just rot away." There's a number of articles about this topic, but I just don't see parents accepting the message: boredom is good for young people. Heck, boredom is why I got into programming my Commodore-64 back in the day - Midwest winters are long and boring as shit, lots of time stuck inside. - https://youthfirstinc.org/why-its-important-for-your-child-to-be-bored/ https://youthfirstinc.org/why-its-important-for-your-child-t... - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/well/family/kids-summer-boredom.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/well/family/kids-summer-b...
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  We took away my kid's screens for a week because we caught her lying to us about something. She was understandably upset and bored for a few days, and then found ways to occupy her time. Not productive ways - but ways that reminded me of what I did as a kid without screens.
- bitwize 1y ago
  Maybe that's why so many of the best demoscene coders are from northern Europe—Germany, Scandinavia, Finland? Bored kids with nothing to do but faff with their computers?
  - kqr 1y ago
    ...who spends half the year in darkness, to boot. It's so bad they even have a national holiday to grieve the departure of the sun and call for its return!
airtonix 1y ago
[dead]
lrvick 1y ago
In my household no one has cell phones, so we set expectations of checking in once a day via chat over wifi from laptops, radio, meshtastic, or picking up a public phone... and otherwise learn to be resourceful, self confident, and independent. I am convinced these skills will benefit a kid more than being good at doom scrolling.
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  > In my household no one has cell phones Do you live in the Bora Bora caves!? Seriously, in many highly developed countries, you need a mobile phone for essential government services.
  - lrvick 1y ago
    Hardly. I run a b2b tech company in silicon valley, frequently travel the world, and have a fairly active social life. No essential services ever -require- a phone. Just say it is against your unspecified religion and watch them fall over backwards to create alternatives for you. It is always hilarious to watch someone at a theme park or restaurant produce a paper map or menu just after saying they no longer exist moments earlier. If I travel overnight my only tech is a tiny laptop to work on the go, but when it is closed it is off, and not able to notify me.
- nilus0sora 1y ago
  I was intrigued enough by this comment to create an account. I noticed you mentioned ‘radio’. Do you mean HAM? Like you key up on local 2m repeaters with your HTs? (Our twins got their tech licenses in middle school and we had appointed check-in times during the day). I applaud you for being in the heart of the tech Beast but not subject to it.
  - navbaker 1y ago
    We have some friends (husband and wife) that we met because our kids play together and they are the first people I’ve met that are licensed ham operators! They each have their operator number on their license plates for their respective cars since our state has radio operator plates you can upgrade to!

duxup 1y ago

One of the nicest things about the ban (not total ban) at my kids school is no more parent email "Talk to your kids about their phone" type emails. The kids who are really abusing their phone have parents who don't care to deal with it and they're not reading the emails. The emails just hassle the parents of the kids who already don't do the bad thing. Now if they see a phone it's taken and if taken enough times (twice) the parents have to go to the office to retrieve the phone and have a meeting. Pressure is now on the parents and kids who are the problem.

darknavi 1y ago
It's pretty funny how full circle this is. This was exactly how it was when I was in middle school in flip-phone days (and it happened to me once!).

onionisafruit 1y ago

Funny to see a school administrator talking positively about a loud lunch room. We used to constantly get reprimanded for being too loud.

fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
We did too, but not as a rule and not always, just as a preference of whatever petty tyrant was standing in the lunch room that day
foobarian 1y ago
First you teach them to talk and walk, and then you tell them to shut up and sit down. - old 90s joke

RyanOD 1y ago

Yes, parents are definitely part of the problem here. I am a former teacher and my wife is an active teacher so we've seen this first hand. Though not entirely to blame, parenting is certainly a part of the cell phone addiction problem. Setting time limits and holding kids accountable for breaking rules around phone use would go a long way toward guiding kids toward more healthy behaviors and letting them know someone cares about their well-being. Modeling constrained phone use is another aspect. Parents will struggle to get their kids off their phones if they are spending all their own free time scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

lrvick 1y ago
100% which is why I refused to even try to be a parent until I gave up my smartphone. Parents unable to be present with their kids, should not be parents.
- 0_____0 1y ago
  I'm expecting a newborn soon and thinking the same. What did you change?
  - hvs 1y ago
    Get in the habit of putting your phone down when you are in the room with your child. Don't have it on the dinner table, or anywhere you would socialize with your children. It's really best to just avoid using it as much as possible around your kids. Obviously, if you have to make appointments and stuff, that's different, but scrolling social media, reading news, etc. should be left for the evenings after kids are in bed. Kids don't really care what you say as much as they are always watching what you do.
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      The overall lesson for your kids should be that a phone is a tool you use to accomplish some task that takes a limited time. You turn on the phone, do the task (whether it be making a phone call, looking up an address, whatever) and then you turn it off. A phone is not a consumption/entertainment device that you sit down and just use, without a clear end state. You, as the parent, need to internalize this, and live that attitude yourself, and chances are the kid will follow your good example. Problem is, many parents are also addicted to their phones, and won't be able to have the discipline to use them this way.

mynameisash 1y ago

> Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change. I assume you mean that it's a failure of the school's leadership? My kids' school has been applying more strict bans on phones. I wish they would just flat-out ban them -- no more phones in school, period. But even with their moderate ban, there are a lot of parents that push back because "what if there's an emergency and I need to contact my child?" That makes me think that it's probably just easier (to say nothing of broader-impact) for schools to appeal to state lawmakers: just do a statewide ban, then the school doesn't have to fight parents.

estearum 1y ago
I don't think you can expect schools to stand up to hordes of smartphone-addicted parents demanding no action on this. State-level regulation provides IMO very necessary cover.

Rebelgecko 1y ago

Don't have the link handy, but there was a blog post I saw on HN by a teacher who asked students to spend an hour on their phones in class and record the source of notifications. IIRC texts from parents was one of the top sources of disruption.

throwaway2037 1y ago
I am so curious. I don't want to start a gender war, but is it text messages from mom or dad? I cannot believe the majority come from dad.

elzbardico 1y ago

Jesus! those folks need to leave their kids alone! they are at school!

rufus_foreman 1y ago
Hey! Parent! Leave them kids alone. All in all it's just another brick in the wall.

SchemaLoad 1y ago

Australia has done this for public schools recently. It's been a huge success. Private schools have banned phones for ages. As a teenager I hated how the rule applied during lunch as well, but now I realise it was primarily to get us to physically talk to each other and interact rather than scrolling reddit in the corner. So I'm very thankful we had that rule.

amelius 1y ago

Solution: put a bunch of terminals in the school allowing the kids to send emails to their parents.

easterncalculus 1y ago

> There are still parents that complain. Turns out they are as addicted to texting with their kids all day as their kids are addicted to the same. It turns out this is basically 100% of parents in that cohort. Similar with TikTok, finding a parent who says "(endless hours of) TikTok screentime is fine for my kids" without having the same or more screentime themselves is almost impossible.

sjw987 1y ago

I work with a few parents who spend the day texting/messaging their children. Their children in school are being distracted and their learning is being hindered. The parent at work is being distracted and their productivity and focus is being hindered. It's a lose-lose situation all-round. When I was a kid I managed to get through the school day without looking at my phone (went through during the transition to smartphones, first iPhone). I can't comprehend where we go from here if people use their phones this much. One of my colleagues probably sacks off 2 hours or so of their working day constantly checking their phone, and it's vibration patterns on the desk distract me working adjacent to them.

petesergeant 1y ago
> I work with a few parents who spend the day texting/messaging their children. What do they talk about?! I would speak to my parents -- in a different country -- once a week by phone, at most, as a kid during term time.

matwood 1y ago

> Turns out they are as addicted to texting with their kids all day as their kids are addicted to the same. This is wild to me. When I was growing up, my mom would make sure I didn't sleep through my alarm as she was walking out the door for work. My dad worked shift work in a factory so I would only randomly see him. Usually after the brief morning 'get up!' I wouldn't see either of my parents again until the street lights came on at night and I rushed home to eat. Once I could drive, I had a job after school until ~10PM, so I would go days without seeing my parents. I grew up in the 80s/90s.

adrianN 1y ago
That sounds a bit sad to me. Did you miss your parents? Were your friends in a similar situation?
- schwartzworld 1y ago
  They called us latchkey kids and it was amazing.
- matwood 1y ago
  My friends were all pretty much in the same situation. I didn't really think in terms of missing my parents - my friends and I were too busy having fun or as we got older too busy making money. It forced me to become independent very early on which I think has been useful throughout life.
- conductr 1y ago
  This sounds similar to my experience. I didn’t miss my parents at all, I was comfortably independent at a younger age. Even on weekends when parents were home, I’d rather be out playing with my friends. I remember leaving notes on the table saying “need $ for X” and I’d find cash there the next day. I needed them but we weren’t each others friends and didn’t need to spend an excessive amount of time together.

conductr 1y ago

> Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change. I finished my schooling right as phones were being introduced in the 90s, also in Texas fwiw, but they were so zero-tolerance about any student owned technology all during the 90s (confiscated pagers and cell phones, nobody had laptops yet). Anyways, I never understood how they did a complete 180 only a few years later and students were then allowed to have phones and laptops with them at all times. It seems like they knew this was a bad idea to begin with but somehow lost their will to fight the surge of tech.